


maple candy, present participle

by agivise



Series: michigan [2]
Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Gen, blah blah blah unreliable narrator character study stream of consciousness you get the point, daniel deserves a happy peaceful post-canon life 2k19, that's it that's the story, there isn't even a plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 16:43:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17881448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/agivise/pseuds/agivise
Summary: and all of a sudden, you’re sitting there at your little kitchen table in your little makeshift home, and you’ve never been happier, and you’ve never been more nauseatingly alone.(or, acceptance.)





	maple candy, present participle

**Author's Note:**

> sorry i haven't written for a while. bioinformatics is a goddamn bitch of a field to be studying, no matter how much i love it.   
> admittedly i was not expecting to write a sequel to murders of murderers but oh well too bad. general warnings for. like. every bad thing that happened in the podcast bc, yknow, post-canon
> 
> today's song recs: dance of death by andrew bird and eighth wonder by lemon demon

and all of a sudden, you’re sitting there at your little kitchen table in your little makeshift home, and you’ve never been happier, and you’ve never been more nauseatingly alone.

each breath in is frigid. each breath out is warm.

you see the spot on the front porch where the wood’s just a bit darker, from that that time with  _ him, _ the time you hold in pedestalled memory like those old books you keep telling yourself you’ll reread one day. you smell the smoky, acidic rot of spilled coffee on your hands — you picture it seeping into your skin, drowning out the old scent of burning with a new one, a new charcoal-tinged presence, to match the griefless expression you see on your reflection in the kettle each morning as the sun rises. you were never one to sleep in. 

at least now you do it ‘cause you like the way the light hits the broken glass in the ruins of the lighthouse.

at least you don’t do it ‘cause it’s killing you.

a sizeable piece of you is dead in space, with him, with  _ her. _ you always thought that piece was your heart, but it can’t be, because your heart is  _ here _ — here in the floorboards you laid yourself, reclaimed from the staircase of the lighthouse ‘cause you liked the way they looked, here in the hole in the roof of the kitchen you still haven’t boarded up, where the wildflowers crept right on in at some point in the several years between the death of the prior owner and now. your heart is in the crook of your elbow that never quite healed right after they tried to drag you kicking and screaming from the last dregs of your humanity, the elbow you broke to hell and back clawing your bloody, violent way back to earth. your heart is in the notebook scrawled in lawless, sprawling cursive, the one you stole from his apartment years ago, just to prove that you could, just to prove that he’d let you.

your heart is fried to a crisp outside the disabled airlock where you died years ago, where you forced her to listen to you try to scream through the radiation and the choking sobs because you wanted so badly to have been the right one, the real one, the  _ person.  _ as if you ever had been.

(your heart is here in your chest, pumping blood that just doesn’t bleed like it used to. what ever happened to that scar on the back of your hand? have your colds always passed this quickly?)

he always used to put jam in his tea, instead of sugar cubes or honey. you never questioned it at the time. you’re questioning it now. he was a strange son of a bitch, but he was a damn good chef. the only skill he ever bothered keeping secret. he cooked you dinner once. didn’t even use his own kitchen, just waltzed into your place with a bag of groceries, whipped up something with rosemary and lamb and the bottom-shelf wine you snuck into an empty bottle of the pricey stuff. you wonder if that was meant to be a date.

you dig through your cupboards and don’t find any tea or jam, but you do find some maple candy, which you lower slowly into a fresh mug of coffee with a fork, watching the sugar dissolve and diffuse. it smells godly. it tastes even better. really, the only thing it could possibly use is a bit of spice. the scientist in you is triple-dog-daring you to add some sweet paprika or some bird pepper just for the hell of it.

you stopped drinking sweetened coffee a decade ago, because god  _ forbid  _ someone see you drinking some sugary bullshit, right? what a stupid reason. you love sugary bullshit. all hail the sugary bullshit coffee. all hail never having to give a shit about what people think again.

you spend a lot of time alone now. not that you’re complaining. you make chump change off the music you post online and the wallets you swipe from jackasses at the grocers, and you’ve got a decent cache in savings. (turns out, it’s really easy to not spend any of your lovely ballistics-specialist income when you’re ten billion miles from the nearest convenience store.) it won’t sustain you forever, but it’ll tide you over for however long it takes you to settle back into earth life in the aftermath, and that’s all you really need, for now. you even have enough to buy yourself a fishing rod. you’re considering taking up fishing. a bit. you have no interest in fishing, but the awful sanguine bastard side of you is just itching to see red after so much time without it, and this is probably the least morally outrageous outlet you have handy. plus, fish have, like, vitamins or some shit. woo, vitamins.

your heart is here. you like it here.

really, though, you need a new hobby.

in school, you learned only as much about programming as was necessary to be a damn good engineer. and then, a month and a half after meeting her, she tried to teach you how to code — alright, how to _hack_ — but she just had this goddamn _attitude_ about it. like every second you sat there painstakingly typing out a _hello, world_ in a new language, she just wanted to scream, _it’s not that fucking difficult, daniel._ she was brilliant, _god_ she was brilliant, but she was a fucking terrible teacher. you could practically hear her thinking the insults. _don’t be a moron, just use recursion to overload the stack and retrieve the login data from the top. stop fucking up the syntax, all you gotta do is exploit the uninitialized pointer to access the memory address you need. what, like it’s supposed to be difficult? you clearly aren’t trying._

just  _ constantly. _

she was inspiring. still is. just sucked at encouragement. could’ve never been a teacher. a scientist, through and through.

you think you might try and learn it again.

he never bothered trying to teach you piano. ironically, he had always been a fantastic teacher.

you think you’ll try and learn that, too.

**Author's Note:**

> as always, comments mean the absolute world.  
> thank you.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [maple candy, present participle [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17975072) by [PresAudiobooks (PresAlex)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresAlex/pseuds/PresAudiobooks)




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